The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Less is More

A minimal Debian install comes without the ability to view man pages. Fair enough, it’s minimal after all. But they can be quite useful. A sudo apt install man later results in man pages being shown. That’s all, folks? Unnfortunately not, because the man pages are shown using the more command, which doesn’t allow for scrolling up and down with the arrow keys or j and k, Pg Up and Pg Dn, and all the other usual niceties. To fix you need to sudo apt install less, a “pager program similar to more.” And better, at least on any machine with sufficient RAM. Meaning anything anyone is likely to use in 2016, or probably also in 1990 for that matter.

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